


Righteous Force

by capuaisburning



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: 40K Inquisition, Gen, Inquisition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-05
Updated: 2014-08-05
Packaged: 2018-02-11 21:25:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2083665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/capuaisburning/pseuds/capuaisburning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An Imperial Interrogator is sent to a maximum-security Inquisition prison facility to practice his verbal interrogation skills against an infamous heretic. He must prove he has the conviction and skill to break the prisoner's will by demonstrating the superiority of Imperial ideology. Even in the dungeons of the Inqusition however, heresy can still muster a threat...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Righteous Force

I was in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Harsh and frigid stone surrounded me, bleached in the deep, soul-shaking cold of this forsaken moon. In places, the walls were carved with forbidding imagery, depicting familiar scenes of a wrathful Emperor and the torments of the damned with workmanlike but effective ability. More frequently the wall was only crudely-shaped lunar rock, decorated only with rearing shadows and the occasional morbid spatter. Spheres of fuzzy, greenish light marked the way ahead, soaking my retinue in a haunting glow as we strode through the gloom.

My guides and guards were thickset troopers in the service of the Ordos, anonymous beneath the bulky swaddling of their blank, black uniforms, faces sheathed in masks of dark, creaking leather. Each man clasped a polished hellgun to his chest. Their boots rang against the bare stone of the floor with a fierce rhythm.

I walked in their midst, uncomfortable in starchy leggings and a black tunic of office that sported the rune of Inquisitor Stratorious. I squirmed inwardly as the rough fabric bristled spitefully against my skin, but I kept my face solemnly blank and my steps sure. I was Critus Longinus, Interrogator.

For the past four years I had been in the service of Stratorious, the ruthless and magnificent, Saviour of the Celestial Khanate. I was his apprentice, his understudy in the dark glory of the Inquisition. Much of that time had been spent in relative boredom and reclusive study, poring over the finer points of Inquisitorial lore or processing the raw data of some unfolding case while cloistered aboard my master’s personal vessel, the requisitioned frigate he had renamed Cold Sanctity. 

I had been largely grateful for the tedium, for the episodes of adventure and excitement in those four years had been harrowing beyond belief. My once unremarkable hair had fallen out in clumps. On occasion, usually triggered by warp transit, my eyes would weep clear fluid for days on end, as if in remembrance of the terrible sorrows of the warp incursion that ate Santilla township. The ugly scars that quartered my abdomen crawled with pain each year on the anniversary of their birth in frenzied battle with cultists of foul Slaneesh in the Threshian underhive. As indeed they do still.

Yes, I had suffered in the service of Stratorious. I had seen and survived horrors that would snap the minds of many. No callow boy was I! Yet still I recall a queasy fear of what waited for me in the dank cells of the prison complex.

I was surrounded by filth. It might have been merely a noxious cocktail of fear, pain and adrenaline, but I could almost smell treason in those stagnant cells, strong enough to jolt my stomach with each breath. It was a sour, clammy smell, as if given off by some creature slowly dying in a soup of pus, a bitter taint of shame and horror and a brutish distress unbecoming of the divine form and spirit of Humanity. 

I felt a grimace of righteous disgust clench my face as we stalked past great banks of those reeking cells. Cells full of unshaven, dull-eyed men in stained prison overalls, their battered bodies stamped with dark, angular runes signifying penance and purgation. Cells where women strapped to rusted gurneys keened like maimed birds while orderlies adjusted arcane machines that pumped their shrivelled limbs with many-coloured chemicals of bright, angry hue. Cells where skeletal servitors with vacant, sunken faces flensed the skin from screeching, gurgling captives. 

I recall I made a show of nodding with approval at the holy work being done, but in truth my nausea was inspired as much by the nature of the heretic’s punishment as by their sinful condition. I had known the mad heat of combat, had seen my share of the noxious and the profane, both in the clotted gore of heathen sacrifice and in the steaming wounds of the dying. I had also, on occasion, witnessed and even assisted in a field excruciation. But up to that time I had never known the horrible profundity, the sheer unmanning ruin and debasement of humanity that is an omega-class Ordo Hereticus containment facility.

We had already passed many scenes of suffering, too intricate in their loathsome detail to be easily described, when we reached the baroque portal to the lower level, the dungeon where the most notorious of transgressors, those deemed the most perilous in their apostate lunacy, were kept sealed away behind specialised wards and security protocols. Graven gargoyles leered at me as the sergeant of my escort detail stepped forward and unclipped an identifier wand from his belt, holding it forward for scanning. Some of the gargoyles shifted on their perches, their protruding eyes whirring and clicking. This deep in Ordos territory, there was not a millimetre of stone or steel that went unobserved, unjudged.

With a daemonical grinding that sent sharp pain knifing into my head, the portal cycled back into the walls, its sensors having glutted themselves on samples of the sergeant’s sweat, his blood, the lustre of his eyes and the steady thumping of his heart. A suffocating, fearsome stench buffeted me. It was not the earthier smell of the levels above. That was desperate and deviant, but still at least weakly tethered to something human. This was something far darker, far more primal, oily with fettered malice and rancid with the Warp.

For half a heartbeat, I am not ashamed to say that I faltered. But I had been charged with a task, and I had everything to prove. I gritted my teeth, and stepped forward.

Bars of harsh light cracked on in sequence as we advanced, displaying ranks of further cells in unsparing detail. Though empty, their bars, floors and walls were crusted with inky stains that broadcast their wrongness like a scream. This was not ordinary filth and gore, I realised, but ichor, mutant pus. The effluvia of altered bodies, unspeakable foes that openly bore the marks of their inner corruption, shamefully stamped upon their twisted frames. 

We were close. A squat iron door was before me, humming dolefully with invisible energies, warded by twin hulking combat servitors with arcane weapons systems jutting out of surgically-rearranged flesh. I noted the graven images of penitence and pain above the lintel, the runes of warding that encircled the frame in a crawling pattern. I noted how my bodyguard dropped back, how they gripped their weapons with watchful readiness, as prepared to gun me down if they suspected my purity to be compromised as they were to fatally check any escape attempt by the room’s occupant.

I stepped up to the door of the chamber, my breath quickening. I heard the whirring of some mechanism a moment before the door ground back, heard the clack of auto-weapons priming, heard the gurgle of cleansing fluids inside a servitor’s body. The sergeant at my back, I entered. 

It was a man. Just a man, a little scrawny but of otherwise unremarkable build. Head crudely shaved, dashes of irregular grey stubble running across his puckered scalp. A black identification glyph tattooed on his chest, the surrounding skin left blistered and inflamed by the hurried procedure. Worn trousers, a faraway look in his vague grey eyes, a bland smile. He could have been an Administratum filing clerk, yet there he sat, spotlighted behind a table of mirrored chrome in an ill-lit interrogation chamber. Something about the incongruous normalcy of this man, coupled with his air of carefree mildness, made my already taut nerves vibrate fiercely enough for me to almost hear their hum of distress.

I knew that the future direction of my career within the Ordos hinged upon my performance in the next few minutes. I had to prove my skill and zeal. I had to break him.

My master had informed me with exacting thoroughness of the grave import that was attached to this task. An Interrogator needed to prove that he had the ability to pit himself against the worst recidivists without flinching. Sly treachery against steadfastness and cool reasoning. Corrupt fanaticism against unyielding faith.

I recalled my master’s aspect, during our final session of instruction in his private chambers at the Paradocian Conclave. I remembered how his eyes had blazed at me from behind his visor of dark steel, embossed with a garish motif of twisting flames.

“Remember, boy!” he had rasped through his scarred throat, “it is not enough to confine the heretic, to chastise the heretic, to destroy the heretic. It is of course our duty and our pleasure to inflict just and holy suffering upon their worthless bodies, and to invade and dismantle their diseased minds. But there are other tools in our armoury, that must see regular use if they are not to rust and leave us brittle before the Archenemy’s blandishments. There will come a time, boy, if you are clever and strong enough to survive, when you must face the most insidious dissembling, the most subtle blasphemies, spilled from the tongues of the seemingly-reasonable, the worldly-wise, the poisonously nuanced.” He all but spat the word. “Will mere denial and painful retribution be enough? Will you smother with screams the dark whispers that might nestle into your dreaming mind like burrowing roots when you lie down to sleep?”

I had hesitated, nervous and wrong-footed. Doubts had bit at me, grim premonitions of future trial. The Inquisitor’s eyes had flashed. 

“That is why it is my method that my apprentices learn to confront the heretic in purely verbal interrogation. You will use all the oratory I have taught you, married to your native intelligence, to cut through his lies and cynicism and lay his sins bare, illuminated by the truth of the Emperor.”

I pondered those words as I drew up an ornate chair of office and perched upon it, staring at the heretic across the table-top. I noted with veiled relief that heavy shackles had been fixed to his wrists and ankles, chains of sanctified steel wending back into the darkness.

My subject smiled slightly, and shuffled in his seat. His chains clinked and chimed.

“Do you know why I am here?” I asked, injecting gruff authority into my voice in order to overlay my private unease.

He affected a nonchalant shrug. The sergeant stepped forwards with a shock prod, but I waved the man back, indicating for us to be left alone. He nodded smartly, and stepped out into the corridor.

“You are here, heretic,” I continued, “to confess your many transgressions, and to petition the Emperor for mercy in the hope of receiving his peace.”

“Andy why,” said my subject, idly inspecting a weal of red-raw skin slashed across his bare forearm, “should I wish to do that?”

“I can think of any number of reasons,” I had said. “Fear of further punishment for your defiance, or a desire for your current suffering to end. A rational understanding that your position is hopeless and a formal acknowledgement of your total defeat. Or perhaps, the very possible, albeit unlikely impulse towards sincere repentance, motivated by consuming guilt over your crimes against the Emperor’s majesty.”

The heretic looked pensive. After a moment he cleared his throat and asked mildly, “And do any of those options seem likely to you?”

I furrowed my brow. “I’ve studied your record. I know what you’ve done. So no, I don’t think your repentance likely. I think you are recidivist scum, and you will die damned and screaming. But form and protocol must be obeyed.” I paused, and wetted my lips. “I would not expect such as you to understand.”

“Such as me?” The heretic looked at my sidelong, almost chidingly. “And why is that?”

I sniffed and sat up fractionally straighter in my seat, warming to my theme.

“You are filth of the Archenemy. You thrive on mayhem, you worship the animal, the anarchic, the perverse. Your degraded senses could never perceive the holy clarity of divine and disciplined order.”

“That sounds rather like a challenge, sir,” the subject chuckled. Chuckled!

“A challenge implies contest,” I said, “and this is not an arena. This is a prison. You are utterly within our power, and any blasphemies you might see fit to spout are but impotent mewling, devoid of validity. Our order prevails, and any yearnings you might have fall beyond hope.”

The prisoner glanced at his shackles, seeming to notice them for the first time, before letting his gaze rove around the interrogation chamber for a moment, as if he had only just registered his unlovely surroundings.

“I do appear to be “utterly within your power”, don’t I?” He smiled wryly. “Though I wonder…if our positions were reversed, what exactly would you say, Interrogator? If this prison was a playground for my Gods, if the guards were mutants, lusting for worshipful pain? If you were the one chained, and I the one looming before you in grim majesty?”

“That is immaterial.” I said sharply.

“Is it? Think a moment, my sullen, starchy Interrogator, if the dogma that throttles your brain will permit you. What is your Imperial authority based on, really?”

“On the might of the Emperor,” I immediately replied.

“The might of the Emperor,” he said wonderingly, as if this was some fascinating new concept unfamiliar to his ears.

I felt less uneasy now, though largely because my concerns were being buried by increasing aggravation at his cocksure manner.

“Yes,” I growled.

“And what is the Emperor’s might really? What is its ultimate foundation? Have you ever, in your entire life, spent a moment of sincere, unreserved contemplation of what that actually means?”

“It means the strength and nobility of humanity.”

“A recipe for some wretchedly circular logic, but I’ll indulge it for the moment.”

“Thank you, heretic,” I gritted.

“The strength and nobility of humanity.” The heretic cocked his head thoughtfully. “Which essentially means the strength of those famously inexhaustible armies, doesn’t it? Billions upon billions of men and women, fighting and dying and killing in unaccountable numbers every minute of every hour so that the Emperor can call himself master of the galaxy for yet another day. Dying because they know no better.”

“They die because it is their honoured duty to the Emperor!” I interjected fiercely.

“Because they know no better,” he went on, “because their worlds are claimed and kept by force and their bodies and minds are kept confined by the same. It is force in the end, raw strength and technological brutality multiplied a thousand thousand thousand times. Force is all that gives your Emperor his right to the galaxy, as it was force that gave it to the Eldar before him, and to the older powers before that. Just as that incorrigible scoundrel Horus would have ruled had he stood victor in that little scuffle ten millennia ago.”

It wasn’t that he said the name of the Warmaster, for that particular piece of lore was of course well-known to me. It was the blithe, offhand way he made the comparison, as if he was at debate practice at some effete institution of the Imperial nobility. I sprang out of my chair with an oath, cuffing him furiously about the face and head in a sequence of whirring blows.

“You damned heretic!” I snarled. “You pernicious, disseminating, damned heretic! You think you can just throw these putrid blasphemies in my face, as if the faith is some intellectual curiosity that your sophistic cesspit of a mind can probe and pick at?”

The heretic looked at me calmly, his face already puffy from my attentions.

“A very elegant illustration of my point, thank you,” he said, his bloody lips creasing into a slight smirk.

Inwardly cursing my loss of control, I stamped back to my seat and sank into it gracelessly. I heard his chains clatter behind me as he shifted.

“Force in the service of the Emperor is righteous force,” I muttered, “violence in the defence of humanity and the persecution of its foes becomes holy, a sacrament of wrath and pain.”

“Ah. I see,” he said, sardonically.

Ignoring the implied mockery, I forged ahead with my dissertation, casting my mind back across years of study, sifting through every orthodox treatise I had ever read for inspiration.

“Force’s righteousness is determined by the intent and purpose behind it,” I said, “thus distinguishing the just and disciplined violence of the Imperium from the lawless brutality of the heretic, who seeks bloodshed and disharmony for its own sake. There is an order of difference between violence committed in a noble cause and violence committed in service to unclean goals.”

“I see,” said the heretic, “though I wonder at the implication that the Imperium’s brutality is such an austere and joyless pursuit. You must have spilt no small measure of blood for the Inquisition by now. Are you telling me that you never once enjoyed it?”

I glared at him, remembering the elemental joy of a score of victorious skirmishes. 

“Besides, beneath the rhetoric your logic remains essentially circular. You assume that violence performed by the Imperium is ultimately noble because it is performed by the Imperium. As if the las-bolt cares what it sears, or the flamer contemplates what it burns. As if the billions devoured by Exterminatus could have drawn comfort, in their last hour of pain and terror, from the knowledge that the thousand or so heretics amongst them shared extinction in its fires?”

“Your appeal to sentiment is as disingenuous as it is corrupt, heretic,” I growled. “I know full well that the lives of trillions would mean nothing to such as you. You would label my superiors butchers for slaying a doomed world to cauterise its pestilence, when you would do the same with a joyful smile, in order to ensure the ruin and degradation of a dozen more. You know full well that your obscene existence makes such harshness necessary. You know full well why we are required to sacrifice so many lives, and the higher goals served by such suffering.”

“Stability, order, the preservation of your great Imperium?” he said, somehow succeeding in keeping overt disdain out of his voice.

I tilted my head back proudly. “By the Emperor, yes. Holy violence has brought order and prosperity to thousands of worlds. Blood has mortared an edifice of divine rule that has defied millennia. Where there would be strife and penury, we have brought humanity a fighting chance to survive. We are the watchmen who keep the forces of Chaos banished to the Outer Dark, or,” I treated him to a meaningful smirk, “shackled beneath our heel. A monument to our Master’s divine power and authority.”

“Like this prison, you mean?” said the heretic in a low and oddly solemn voice.

I felt a rush of triumphant spite. “Exactly like this prison,” I hissed. I darted around the table, tugged his head back and glared scornfully into his eyes. “And that’s what all your sophistries and vainglorious dissent come up against in the end, isn’t it? The fact that you are a prisoner of the Imperium. You have been caught, you have been found out. You can’t whisper your poison out of the shadows at will anymore. All you can do is rail against the chains that bind you, as if words could part cold steel. A helpless, pitiful, impotent failure.”

I caught a flicker of response in his eyes, and grinned. “Your words are meaningless, because your inferiority is self-evident, while my words bear the terrible weight of vindication. Gaze upon the walls of this prison, heretic! Observe its proud discipline, its enduring strength! Thousands of blasphemers and reprobates have answered to Imperial justice within it, and thousands more will follow over numberless generations to come! And in the end, they all broke, heretic. There was not one of them who could not be purged, body and soul. As I shall purge you. I shall cleanse your mind with despair until you finally understand that only the Emperor’s mercy stands between you and the void of utter hopelessness and obliteration.”

He squirmed in my grip, blinking rapidly, but I wasn’t finished. “You see, in a perverse sense you were right, heretic. In the end, force is what matters. Strength is paramount. And in this place, it is Imperial strength, Imperial will, Imperial ingenuity that prevails.”

I released him and stepped back, imagining myself every inch the imperious, commanding Inquisitor-to-be.

The prisoner looked down at his shackled hands for a long moment. His fingers twitched, seeming to claw at the air with frustration. His shoulders were tightly hunched, angry tension radiating from his taut posture.

“So you admit I was right about something,” he croaked, grimly.

I curled my lip with pleasure. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

The prisoner looked up, his eyes smouldering with a gratifying degree of consternation.

“I think you are overly-impressed with this prison,” he muttered.

“If bitterness is all you have to offer…” I smiled and turned towards the door.

There was a deafening crash of metal, a thunderous, discordant peal that made me start violently, my heart galloping. I spun back in a blur of movement. It had been the sound of his shackles falling to the floor. He was already leaping towards me with liquid speed. Trained reflexes took over as I shifted into a combat stance, but he swatted aside my guard as if I was an errant child and drove calloused knuckles into my face with enough force to send me reeling against the chamber wall. My head filled with jags of light and blood spurted out of my nose. Another fist creased my gut and left my hunched and gagging, well positioned for an elbow to drive into the back of my neck and force me to my knees.

Shocking pain gripped my body. I didn’t have the wit to resist as his fingers latched onto my hair and yanked my head back, so he could whisper breathily into my ear.

“Consider this a lesson in the effective application of force.”

His presence whisked away from me. I heard the urgent slap of footsteps, a guard’s voice shouting alarm, and then the crack of a hell-gun firing and the sound of a thunderous sequence of body-blows.

Cursing wildly and dashing blood from my upper lip, I struggled back to my feet. The cell door was ajar, and the sound of frantic fighting echoed from the corridor beyond. Still dazed and unsteady, I moved towards it.

The illumination, never dazzling to begin with, had been snuffed out somehow, apart from the distant fuzz of emergency lighting adding some shape to the gloom. A nasty twist of intuition in my throbbing gut told me that the more sophisticated scanners were likely to be down as well. My Ordo Hereticus guard detail was sprawled about me, blood weeping out of their crushed visors. Impossibly, insanely, the giant combat servitors were toppled into their sides, inky fluid draining out of torn cables and motive units sparking and smoking. I could hear hellgun fire resounding somewhere in the distance.

Beyond that was another sound, a threatening succession of harsh echoes, rapidly drawing closer. It sounded like scores of cell doors, not to mention the restraints of a score of excruciation racks, springing open in sequence.

I fumbled out my sidearm, and checked that my energised rapier was still moored at my hip. I heard running footsteps and shrill, maddened voices, and swallowed heavily, registering the sour taste of my own blood.

It was only moments before they came at me. Recidivists, deserters, traitors and all manner of damned scum. They hurtled down the corridor, baying threats, loping like wolves. 

The first clutch of them toppled as my pistol roared death into them, spent casings dancing through the blood of the fallen guards. The gun clacked empty, and my rapier hissed as it drank the life of my next assailant, the fizzing blade scraping against his sternum, pink froth from his gasping lips flecking my cheeks. As I stared into eyes full of madness, his hand flashed out and fastened onto the stem of my rapier, his fist immediately smouldering and warping in the energy field. With a snarling scream he fell back, dragging the rapier out of my grip. I was unarmed, and his brothers and sisters were upon me.

The galaxy shrank to a tight whirl of fists and feet and spitting faces and pain. Blows crashed into me from all angles. If not for the discreet reinforcement in my clothes and the equally discreet augmetic work beneath them, I would have been dead in minutes. I blocked, struck and threw with practised, automatic discipline, drawing squirts of blood and porcine squeals of pain, but lacked the skill to defeat the whole mob of them. Unreasoning panic began to trill at the back of my mind.

A baton of polished jet, still greasy with the gore of its previous owner, hove into view, slamming against the side of my head with sickening jolt. My scalp torn and blood sluicing down my neck, I crumpled down into a stifling hell-world of crowding, jostling legs and stamping feet. Their mad grins clustered above me, their eyes hungry, sparking points of warp-light.

Desperate fear crowded my mind. My limbs crackled with agony, and I could feel things crunch and shift in my torso as they gouged away my defensive gear and sent yet more punishing blows hurtling into me, seeking out my life to crush it.

Keener than pain was doubt, lashing against my fraught mind. The heretic had thrown my world of order and discipline into lethal madness at a stroke, and I felt my faith crack and fissure in a manner I had never experienced before. It was the most unmanning, terrorising sensation of my life. I bleated like a child at the shock of it, though the sound was fortunately drowned out by the raging voices of my assailants. The prisoner’s sardonic smile hovered in my mind’s eye, flickering through a greyish haze as my consciousness shrank and shrivelled. My heart thumped dolefully, sending spits of pain darting through my crushed chest.

Suddenly, there was the menacing whine of a high-strength energy weapon. Dread and doubt creased those evil faces, before they were split apart in a spattering storm of flash-fried gore. I twitched and yelped with shock as their dead, sodden remnants rained down on me.

Those that didn’t perish instantly rounded on their attacker like wolves at bay. More fire slashed through them, setting its victims to a frenzied jig before their dying fall, each anguished grimace lit by sharp flashes of bleached white light.

I twisted my head sluggishly, trying to focus on my saviour, who now sprang fluidly into the midst of the rampaging prisoners. A dizzying assault ensued, as the killer pitilessly stove skulls and splintered limbs, stamping the breath out of the retching throats of the fallen.

The last of them stumbled back, turning to flee. The stock of a las-weapon rammed against the back of his head, hurling him onto his face with a damp crunch.

The figure turned to me, approaching with languid steps. I blinked blood and pain-tears out of my eyes and moaned as I recognised the arch-heretic.

He shushed me, gently, mockingly. “I did try to warn you, “Interrogator”. I hope you now understand some measure of the great truths I attempted to illumine for you in our earlier discussion.”

Dazedly, I recalled the form that was expected of me. “Damned heretic…” I croaked, the words pushed, slurred and strained, through bloody lips. There was little conviction in them. 

He tutted. “A hollow sentiment now, I’m afraid. But then, it always was, wasn’t it? It was always about the form and appearance of being the stalwart Imperial servant. I could tell from the moment you walked into my chamber. No genuine steel behind it, none at all. No…conviction.”

I groaned feebly. My fingers twitched for a weapon, but only succeeded in further smearing my own pooling blood.

“Not that I blame you,” he went on, “for in a galaxy as harsh and depraved as this, I find all conviction ultimately becomes brittle and hollow. Insanity, the only sane response.”

“Emp…ror,” I blithered.

“My point exactly,” he chuckled. “Just let it go, my friend. Your pious notions of duty, your false and choking oath to whatever righteous thug of a master sent you here. Forget it all, take my hand, and let me illumine you further.”

Heartbeat racing, life busily draining out of me, I lifted a mangled hand with a whimper of effort. His fingers made a cruel vice around my own. I heard his satisfied hiss of breath.

“As I thought,” he said, in a strangely deep and brooding voice that made my blood-hot breath freeze with its terrifying familiarity, “how…disappointing.”

The lights came back on in an instant, impossibly, searingly bright. I squealed and writhed like a child as the cold inferno bored into my head, filling up my skull with its vicious scrutiny. 

It felt like a pain-wracked eternity before I could prise my eyes back open and see the face above me ripple and change as the psychic glamour fell away, revealing the scowling eyes that glared through the slits of that forbidding black visor. My master. Inqusitior. Stratorious.

“You failed the test, Interrogator,” he grated, “your faith proved as brittle as I suspected. Oh, what a penance I shall prepare for you…”

“But…all the heresies you said…your reasoning…” I gasped.

“Reason!” he spat, “The Emperor’s domains are not kept safe by reasonable discourse, boy. If you can be so easily reasoned out of your sacred charge, then reason is best rejected! Our master requires servants of will unshakeable to the point of pious irrationality, even to the point of utter, hopeless ruin! Nothing less will suffice!”

“The lesson is…well learned, master,” I breathed.

He grunted. “On that subject, Interrogator, we shall have to see.”


End file.
